Chemirmir

In the years after Leah Corken’s death, one detail after another haunted her daughter.

Though M.J. Jennings came to accept that her mother likely died of a stroke, just the night before, they had gone shopping and to a movie and the 83-year-old had seemed her usual sassy self.

When Corken’s body was found in 2016 on the living room floor of her apartment at The Tradition-Prestonwood, an upscale independent living community in Dallas, her freshly styled hair was a mess. There were makeup smudges on her bedroom pillow.

And her wedding ring was missing.

“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know,” Jennings said. “I didn’t know it was murder.”

M.J. Jennings looks at a photo of her mother, Leah Corken, while sitting at her home in Dallas on Nov. 3. The Associated Press

Across Dallas and its suburbs over a two-year span, family after family had similar misgivings, troubled over missing jewelry and puzzling on the suddenness of their older but otherwise healthy and active loved one’s death.

Then, in March 2018, 91-year-old Mary Annis Bartel survived after a man forced his way into her apartment, telling her “don’t fight me” as he tried to smother her with a pillow and left with jewelry. The next day, police arrested Billy Chemirmir. Authorities announced they would review hundreds of deaths, signaling the possibility that a serial killer had been stalking older people.

Over the following years, the number of people Chemirmir was accused of killing grew. He goes on trial Monday in the death of 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris — one of 18 women he is charged with killing. Chemirmir, 48, faces life in prison without parole if convicted, as prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty.

Most of the victims were killed at independent living communities for older people, where Chemirmir allegedly forced his way into apartments or posed as a handyman. He’s also accused of killing women in private homes, including the widow of a man he had cared for in his job as an at-home caregiver.

At a news conference days after Chemirmir’s arrest, then-Plano Police Chief Greg Rushin acknowledged a tendency to assume the death of an older person is natural.

“There is not a deep investigation. … It would be very easy to disguise a crime,” Rushin said.

When police tracked Chemirmir to his nearby apartment following the attack on Bartel, he was holding jewelry and cash. A jewelry box police say he had just thrown away led them to a Dallas home, where Harris was dead in her bedroom, lipstick smeared on her pillow.

Chemirmir’s attorney didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story, but has previously called the evidence against Chemirmir circumstantial. Chemirmir, who immigrated to the U.S. from Kenya, became a legal permanent resident in 2007.

Eight of the people he’s charged with killing lived at The Tradition-Prestonwood, and he’s been linked to a ninth resident’s death in a lawsuit.